Kenyan Police Chief Sent Commando Transport Plane on Family Holiday During Garissa Attack

Members of Kenya’s police force look out from the back of a truck as it enters the Garissa University campus on April 3, 2015.

Photo by CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images

In the weeks after the Garissa University massacre in Kenya, carried out by the Somali-based militant group al-Shabab, horror at the brutality of the loss of nearly 150 lives morphed into anger at the Kenyan government’s woefully slow response to the attack. On Tuesday, the government’s ham-handed reaction looked even worse “after a police chief admitted that a plane meant to transport commandos to the scene was instead being used to fly his family back from holiday on the coast,” according to the Guardian.

The plane’s crew had been sent to Mombasa on the morning of the attack to pick up police official Rogers Mbithi’s daughter-in-law and her child, according to the Daily Nation. The plane did, eventually, return and transport commandos to the site of the attack, but that was hours after the siege began. Making things worse “some of the victims had initially managed to hide from the killers after the assault began at dawn, but were discovered and murdered in the afternoon, many hours later,” the Guardian reports. “The police commandos only arrived seven hours after the attack started, finally breaking the siege in the evening.”